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It’s been several weeks since IDF and Intel is finally willing to start sharing more information about its lineup of Skylake processors. Much of the company’s focus is on mobile this time out, as you might expect, but it’s introducing some significant improvements to the Core M family, as well as a full suite of new desktop parts. Unlike Broadwell, which rolled out very gradually from 2014 to 2015, Skylake should launch more quickly.

Let’s step through the new improvements and differences across the product families, starting with the high-end notebook stack.

Skylake U-Series: EDRAM goes mainstream

The big news for Skylake on the mobile front is that Intel is finally bringing its EDRAM hardware to lower-end, lower-power SKUs. Previously, only a handful of high-end laptop chips with 47W TDPs offered Intel’s Iris Pro graphics solution with its 128MB EDRAM cache. With Skylake, Intel is launching a 64MB variant of its L4, and including the technology on both 15W and 28W chips. Branding is also getting a bit of a shake-up — Skylake processors with Intel Iris Graphics will offer a 64MB L4, while chips with Intel Iris Pro (likely confined to the high-end TDP processors) will have the full 128MB. Intel hasn’t revealed whether Skylake Iris-class GPUs clock their EDRAM at 1.6GHz, like previous iterations of the technology, or if Intel trimmed clock speeds on the L4 cache to cut power consumption.

Exactly how much performance the new EDRAM will offer in this thermally and power-constrained environment is still unclear, but extra cache plus Skylake’s new graphics technology should offer significant improvements. Intel’s Iris 540 GPU has 48 EUs, while the Iris 550 has 72 EUs. The lower-end parts, including the desktop chips like the Skylake Core i7-6700K, have 24 EUs.

Core M goes wide

With Broadwell, Intel launched a set of conventional laptop SKUs across the 15W – 45W band and then a new type of low-power SoC, the Core M, for tablets and 2-in-1 devices. Skylake continues this trend, but the Core M family has been rebranded. There are now three levels of hardware — Core m7, m5, and m3. The fastest chip, the Core m7-6Y75, is shown in comparison to the highest-end Broadwell Core M below. We’ve also tossed in a Haswell 11.5W TDP mobile chip for reference.

Skylake, Broadwell, Haswell

The new Core m7 picks up a bit more clock headroom, slightly faster DDR3 memory, and a higher maximum TDP (7W, compared to 6W). With Core M, we saw rather erratic results from various OEMs, since Intel chose to give its manufacturers more headroom and flexibility to design systems. The end result was that in some cases, Intel’s lowest-end Core M in OEM System A’s hardware outperformed the highest-end Core M from OEM System B. The Skylake Core M is supposedly much smaller than Broadwell’s flavor, which should allow for even tinier motherboards and possibly larger batteries in the same chassis.

What’s interesting about this comparison, however, is how much things have changed in the years since Haswell launched. We can’t compare performance between the three chips without hardware to test, but Intel has introduced significantly faster DDR3 support, faster, more-efficient GPUs, and boosted L3 cache to 4MB, up from 3MB on Haswell (not shown above). 4K support is now standard, even on low-power chip, whereas previous Intel processors in this segment topped out 2560×1600.

The Y-series is particularly impressive, given that these chips include a “big core” x86 processor. No, they won’t compare well against small ARM cores designed for smartphones, but they’re far smaller than anything Intel was fielding just a few years ago.

Finally, intel has also announced a new version of its Compute Stick, following up on the flavor that launched roughly six months ago. This new Compute Stick will be based on Core M, rather than Atom, which will undoubtedly improve its overall performance. Price and other characteristics, however, remain largely unknown. These aren’t trivial issues — many reviewers reported that the Compute Stick had a tendency to lag, and that wireless radio performance was far from optimal. Adopting Core M may fix some of these performance issues, but we suspect Intel will have to program the chip to its minimum TDP to stay within thermal limits on such a small enclosure.

These new Skylake Generation 6 processors suggest the action is in Tablets, Laptops, and Desktops and not Phones. Does this mean the Windows 10 Continuum devices should not be Windows Phones with the Snapdragon ARM processors and instead with the Gen 6 Windows tablets? That’s what I recommend.

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